Untitled 2: The Beautiful Renaissance

It raises the mind by accommodating the images of things to our desires, and not like history and reason, subjecting the mind to things." By appealing to Bacon on the value of fiction, Dunlop not only invokes the authority of a major British thinker but also neatly hurdles almost two hundred years of wrangling over the morally dubious effects of taking pleasure from fiction. By using the general term fiction for his history of romances and novels, Dunlop encompasses the polemical terms of the debate he would nonetheless inflect and recast. Eighteenth-century defenses of the novel (from Congreve and Richardson to Fielding and Reeve) usually engage a set of polar oppositions still familiar to us: the novel is to the romance as the «real» is to the "ideal," as fact is to fantasy, as the probable is to the amazing, as the commonplace is to the exotic, and so on. Fiction is developed by Dunlop as a third term that -9- can at once finesse and reconcile these polar oppositions. Fiction does this by becoming art, delivering "a more perfect order, a more beautiful variety" than "nature." Through Dunlop's use of Bacon, Renaissance and Romantic aesthetics meet in a justification of fiction that is, finally, psychological ...»